Physical Process: Group Project

The last process and production session with Nick was a collaborative project with the rest of my peers. Initially I was quite nervous to be doing work alongside others, as this meant my work would have to be reliable and of good quality; where as usually if I do something wrong it can be considered acceptable because I can just re-do it. We were under a time constraint, which added to the pressure of creating work. The first stage of the work was to create our own individual pieces and they would be voted upon for the collaborative project. My work didn't get chosen, however, it did garner a few votes which mad me quite pleased, as usually I don't rate my work very highly. Although Nick mentioned we were quite slow, I thought we worked very well as a team - we could create something like an alternative pattern (the blue on one page and white on the other) with barely any mishaps, and it showed that I can actually work quite well in a team as I did lead a lot of the work and planning to make sure it went together well.  

Inspired by the work, I then edited the photography taken at the session to create some prints with half-tone patterns, inspired by the font. I wanted to create something that was sort of like a post-card, that was kept simple with an lasting impact. I did like this session, it was out of my comfort zone but I warmed to it as the hours went on and found, although Nick thought we were a bad team, that I enjoyed working alongside my peers for once, we created something visually that I was quite proud of and it was nice to do some more physical work instead of digitalised - it proved to be a nice break for me.

Cinema 4D: As a Design Tool

My last session for C4D with Jay this year - I have to say I was surprised at how much I loved this session. It had to be one of my favourites simply because of how much I learned. The thing with 4D is that the more you put into it the more rewards you get out of it, it's so easy to use. The most surprising thing for this session was how easy the bottle cap was to create. I thought with the unique shape of it it would be difficult, but it was one of the easiest ones to create. Based off the shape of it it was just piling together different circles and spreading them out, then creating a shape over the top. 

One of the things I liked about this sessions was the availability to use what we'd created as templates, and could take them home and edit the maps that Jay gave us. This is what I did shown below, inspired by my love for Once Upon a Time and Foxes. I created something that was unique and individual so instead of using a glass bottle I wanted to create something "frosted" or matte, which gave the design a bit more of an professional and expensive finish. 

My favourite part of the process this year was 4D. I was surprised at how I found this, because normally I would shy away from software that involves 3D process because of how complex I initially thought it would be. This session proved me completely wrong, as if I followed it slowly then it would actually be quite easy to do. I was really impressed with how far my skills went this year.

After Effects: Show Reel

I aimed to make my showreel a reflection of the theme of my website, using colours, style and my logo to bring all my work together. Although this was meant to be just a reel of our work from After Effects sessions this year - I chose to add my own work that I'd done outside of these sessions, for my final projects from Year One and Two as I really wanted to showcase these alongside my work. They may be considered old but the amount of hours into them reflect the quality of work I wanted to show.

I tried to keep the piece upbeat, quick and to the music; I wanted something that wasn't too slow to view and had a pace about it. My main concern was that the styles were so different in each of my work that it would look like lots of different people had done each piece, however this worked in my favour because I like how it showcases the amount of uniqueness and different styles I can incorporate into animation. 

My favourite piece is probably still the first year project I did, although old I put so many hours into the piece and it looks so professional. 

Cinema 4D: Textures

One of the final process and production sessions with Jay covered the use of Cinema 4D and textures. Like all the sessions, I found this to be one of the most helpful ones - it proved informative and I learned so much that previously I hadn't known. One of the things that I'd like to have done differently in this sessions is to not storm ahead and think that I can learn things on my own, as Jay had to come over and revert my work that I'd done. Although I thought at this point I was quite comfortable with Cinema 4D, I did create a lot of errors in my work that had to be reverted. This made me feel a bit unconfident in the software that I was using, although the outcome of the work I was actually immensely happy with. The software is so experimental, so that means the majority of the work can be made flexible and personal to you, so no two work is the same.

One of the things I love about Jay's sessions is how much I learn. Although it feels like a lot to take in at first, the restriction of phones means that we can "wire ourselves" in and learn everything without any distractions. This was always a good thing for me as C4D was a software that I was least confident in this year - so it was nice to finally sit down and learn it without feeling too nervous. 

I really enjoyed the experimental stage of learning this software, as it means there's nothing that can really go wrong in terms of changing the shape - just because yours doesn't look like someone elses doesn't mean it's wrong, and although we were semi-restricted based on colour and pattern, we could still stylise it personally. One of my favourite outcomes was the final one we did, as it looked so realistic - one of the things about C4D was that it didn't really look digitally created sometimes.

 The other thing about the software was how different you can make the outcomes based off what you change - lighting, colour, tone, illumination etc.

Cinema 4D was quickly becoming one of my favourite software to use, based off how easy it was to create something, and the fact there were so many tutorials online meant that it was quite easy to create something that I liked.

In general, I loved these sessions as I learned so much and could apply it to other projects, and I could also go out of my own time and personalise it to what I wanted to do, which I did in the latest session with Jay.

After Effects: Stats & Infographics

 

This process and production session was a lot more relaxed than previous ones, owing to the fact that I'd learned so much about After Effects in my spare time, and could easily mess around with the tools on my own. I'd prepped a lot of work before hand and played around with shapes/strokes and effects, similar to my Shape Workshop, and incorporated bits we've been told to do in the lesson.

My aim was to make something that was very me-like, and although I'm not girly in the slightest, my website at the moment currently is yellow themed, so I stuck to my signature "colour" as such and incorporated pinks in to make the yellow pop. Owing to Sara's teaching I also added in things I'd learned from previous workshops, like CC Page Turn or using stroke's in different ways.

I'd still say I was a novice at After Effects, I had to sit patiently and work around how I wanted something to be achieved slowly and it did take me a while to perfect anything, however I felt so much more comfortable in the programme then I'd ever previously had before.

Ideas came from the fact that a lot of the information may not be aesthetically pleasing, so my idea was to make it stand out and pop with the use of colour, motion and texture, adding them to give depth to the piece, and sort of more of a rustic feel. One thing Sara suggested would be to consider pacing in my work, as a lot of it is extremely fast paced and doesn't allow the audience to absorb the information quite as well as I'd have liked, and I agree. 

The process for creating my work is simple, which is to mess around until I'm happy with the outcome. I still have a lot to learn with the software but found it increasingly easier to navigate around, I knew how most things worked but was still coming to grips with how to make certains things to what.

I was really pleased with the outcome and would love to continue creating it, maybe as an introduction to my about page for my webite (I'd also have to change the location of Manchester, too!)

Physical Process: Type Stencils

The second session back proved quite daunting to begin with - huge boards filled with different typography; especially since I hadn't done this in a couple of years. Despite my initial set backs (with Nick asking me to refine, and constantly add to my stencils) I was still happy with the work I produced, as it was quite reminiscent of my Art Foundation diploma. The way we had to work, with just paint and some pencils, took me back away from the technology side of design and allowed me to play with how far I could take just a simple medium. For my first piece, I kept it relatively straight forward and clean cut, using the 'e' as inspiration I made the stencil shape out of the inside of an E. Their were many interpretations of what the E could look like - the London underground sign, a burger, STOP signs, or even the internet explorer logo.


It was quite fun that my design unintentionally looked like something else, I couldn't see a lot of the things my peers were saying about my work, as I hadn't gone out of my way for it to look like anything at all. I was quite pleased with the repeating pattern - it would be nice to make some half tone work out of it, or make something like a postcard or cards out of them.

My second and third piece took longer to create because of the abstractness of them - the second piece I did was using the same template as before, and working with the paint to create more tones/textures. I used water to dilute the paint and create the splatter and drips, something that I thought worked quite well.

I really liked the flowy feel to the workshop - nothing was meant to be perfect, in some of my work there's lines where the lines aren't straight or pieces of paint have gone over their templates and made splatters across the work, but I like the tactile feel of the piece and how it reminds me of my time in Art Foundation.

Personal Work

Dalmatian created with Photoshop brushes

Sketch image for practice

Font/Illustrator Practice.

Hyperrealites: Moodboards

Inspired by "dreams & hyperrealities" and my 360 degree sequence idea.

Cinema 4D & Design

My first taste of Cinema 4D this year was a really successful one. Last year, I struggled immensely to get to grips with C4D, the pace of the workshops was too quick and I gave up quite quickly, which lagged me behind even further. This year, Jay told us to place our phones away and pay attention, which helped immensely with how I got to learn the ropes of C4D (even so much that my next project would use Cine 4D)

The hardest thing was keeping up with Jay; after using illustrator for a little bit in the previous project it made it much easier to sketch out the shape I wanted. After playing around with the software for a while, the interface was quite easy to understand, morphing together all the Adobe Software tools (key frames, colours, textures) - one of my favourite parts of the software was creating the colours and textures you'd wanted for each shape; for example, if you wanted a textured look, then you could insert an image of your choosing to create something that wrapped around the shape.

When I'd first started creating my design, my peers told me it looked similar to the shape of a chicken - hence why the text I'd chosen was "cluck cluck", I liked the shape, but afterwards thought it looked slightly tacky, though it was a nice start to Cine 4D that I initially wasn't confident in.

My favourite session so far was definitely this one, the relaxed atmosphere behind the work and the pace was a comfortable position for me to keep up with (I'd managed to learn quite a bit of transferable skills that I could retain and use for future projects)

The hardest thing I'd learned about the session was creating separate layers fro each of the shapes if I wanted to alternate the colour, as originally the entire file was pulled together, so I had to separate it and change the "extrude" to apply it to all of the separate layers.

Overall, I'd loved this session - I was quite surprised at how much so, and my previous distaste for C4D had gone away, as I'd thought it was quite complicated, but, actually, it was quite an easy to get to know software, and involved a lot of experimentation. I even applied it to further tests for my next project, Hyperrealities, shown below:

(The canvas was 360 degrees, rotating around the center object, in this case, a figure)